Can't Decide Between Dental School and Medical School

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sizzlinwok

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So ever since I was young, my parents groomed me to be a doctor. Once I headed into college, I started to have second thoughts and looked into careers in a bunch of other professions. Well, after careful consideration, I can say that I do want to enter healthcare, but I can't decide between declaring Pre-Med or Pre-Dent.

One of the main reasons I was turned off from medical school was the fact that my career wouldn't begin until my 30s. Undergrad, postgrad, residency - it's too much! Especially since school has always been a drag for me. I want to enter the workforce as soon as I can and pay off all my debts.

The prospect of residency matching was also a turn off for me. I've done some minor research into different specialties, and ophthalmology and orthopedics are the ones I've found to be the most interesting, especially since there's a good mix of clinical work and hands on work. I've also considered taking on family medicine, but I feel like the pay doesn't justify the amount of schooling. The possibility of me not being matched to them and having all those years go to "waste" is definitely a major deterrent. I since I am more interested in those topics, and I do have more knowledge about them compared to dental, I guess medical would be the right choice, but I feel like 7+ years of intensive learning would end up making them dull.

Looking into dental, I appreciate the fact that I can enter the workforce sooner, work with my hands, and be more likely to operate my own practice, but I guess since the incentive to become one wasn't with me for 19+ years, it feels really weird for me to consider becoming a dentist. Overall, the specialties seem kinda dull, but I do appreciate the fact that dentistry allows you to return to school and complete a residency after working as a general dentist for as long as you like.

I spent some time shadowing my family doctor and my dentist and both came down to a "daily grind". My doctor has a really small practice with a ton of patients so he's constantly pumping through a list of people with a variety of ailments. My dentist has a bigger practice, but not as large of a density of patients, so she does do some business management in her free time. Her patients were more "fixed". General cleanings, whitenings, and braces were mostly the issues she had to deal with. Honestly, I think I'd be okay with either clientele. Both have their pros and cons, so it's hard for me to make a definitive decision.

Now I'm stuck looking at things like quality of life and things like that. I'd go on but I fell like I've drolled on long enough. Any input is appreciated

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you should shadow other specialties. Family medicine is only a part of what you can do as a doctor.

but if you really hate school, then you should prob not do the premed route
 
How are you doing in your classes? If you are bothered by the idea of long schooling, then dentistry sounds like a better fit for you. Btw it's rather unusual for dentists to deal with braces, is she a pediatric dentist? Check out whether your college has some pre-dental class where students do crowns and whatnot.
 
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you should shadow other specialties. Family medicine is only a part of what you can do as a doctor.

but if you really hate school, then you should prob not do the premed route

Will do. The only other physician that I know is my ophthalmologist and he didn't want me to shadow him because he travels across town to different offices daily. He did recommend that I only shadow primary care physicians just to get a scope of medicine as a whole, but I guess I should expand out and do some cold calling.

Once I get back to school, I'll be volunteering at a local hospital so hopefully I can ask some doctors for some additional shadowing experience as well.
 
do you like the idea of being in someones mouth all day or exploring the rest of the body? is research important to you? those are main questions i'd ask yourself. dep on your answers the right discipline may be more apparent.
 
How are you doing in your classes? If you are bothered by the idea of long schooling, then dentistry sounds like a better fit for you. Btw it's rather unusual for dentists to deal with braces, is she a pediatric dentist? Check out whether your college has some pre-dental class where students do crowns and whatnot.

All A's except for 2 A- 's (in second semester bio and Art history). I'm just more interested in working than learning.
My college doesn't offer any dental classes, but students can apply to shadow at a dental center at a hospital nearby. I haven't looked too closely at it yet, so I don't know how extensive it is.
 
yeah, just start volunteering in medical/clinical setting a lot so you'll know if you really like medicine or not. If you really like it, you would be able to bear the long schooling/training needed.

If you have time you could also shadow dental stuff at the same time to see if you like dental work?
 
You shouldn't be a physician in my opinion, unless your attitude about the required schooling/training changes significantly. You can't be on the fence about what the pre-med route is all about. You better go into that thing ready to take a mental (and physical, if we're thinking about what life is like for sleep-deprived residents) beating that all med-students are subjected to for an extended period of time. Dental students probably take some of those beatings as well but it's for not as long, so it sounds as if dentistry would fit you better in that regard.

Personally, the way you describe your experience shadowing your dentist sounds abysmal to me. I hate having appointments with them so I couldn't imagine volunteering my time to watch one fill cavities and such for 8 hours in a given day.
 
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Sounds like the only thing that has you contemplating medicine is your parents. Everything else you wrote in your post, including getting to the workforce sooner, being dissuaded from the challenges of not getting the field you want, thinking there are only a limited number of competitive subspecialties you might be happy in and bemoaning the 7+ years of intensive training for some of those, makes it clear medicine is a very bad path for you. Medicine is about lifelong learning, and delayed reward. You will do four years of med school and 3-7 years or residency and maybe a fellowship before you start work, and will still feel undertrained and wishing you covered more ground in residency. You will change your mind about desired residencies during the course of med school, and have certain choices dictated to some extent by how competitive you are, how hard you study and how much research you do, what you score on the USMLE. You can get years into med school before you find that ortho or optho won't be in the cards. You need the attitude that you will do what it takes even if it means adding a few years to the path to make your CV look better. You probably won't get optho or ortho if you are the kind of person who feels school is "a drag". Frankly you are probably the kind of guy who does well in college precisely because you don't surround yourself with the type A personalities that end up in these competitive fields. And the fact that you are mostly interested in medicine because of parental pressure makes me think its not going to be what YOU want as much as what they want. That's not a recipe for success. be a dentist -- your post screams that that's really what you'd prefer. You will get to the workforce sooner, get to work with your hands, won't come up short on residencies, and your folks can still call you "doctor".
 
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Jeez what's up with the long posts..ain't nobody got time for that..do you like teeth and a good lifestyle or the entire body and a ****ty lifestyle..


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-bump-

same situation for the most part.
OP what did you end up doing?
 
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